I think the hardest person I've ever known is my own brain. Can I refer to my own brain as its own person?
During one of the harder seasons of my life, I read a book titled "The Power Of Now" by Eckhart Tolle. I still lean on the lessons I learned from it, all these years later. Now, I'm not typically a self-help-book kind of girl. If you are, more power to you - seriously, I wish I was able to lean into those kinds of resources more. For some reason, I'm just not typically drawn to it. It probably (honestly) comes down to thinking I'm smarter than I am. Before you get huffy, I do recognize that my brain muscle is a very smart one. I keep it pretty healthy. That said, I do tend to think I know more than I do. One might call me a know-it-all. Do I love that about myself? Not really. I'm working on it. I try to ask more questions. I try (so, so hard) not to interrupt people and try to essentially guess the end of whatever it is they're explaining. I try not to shoot from the hip when someone asks a question I don't know the answer to. Pobody's nerfect. I'm working on it.
Back to the only self-help book I've ever successfully finished and benefited from. One of the major concepts in this book is what keeps us from being truly present in the moment and what causes a lot of our unnecessary stresses, and that is our egos. I hate to say it (seriously, hate to say it), but if I look at myself, like really look, I'm pretty egotistical. It's why I hate to fail. It's why I want to believe I already know the answer. I want to be the best I can be and I want to believe I'm already the best I can be. Take that with a grain of salt though. My head is pretty full of itself but my heart is not. They are almost comically imbalanced.
Eckhart Tolle describes your ego as a combination of two things: it is the lens of your past experiences and your fear of future experiences. When you are looking through the lens that is your ego, you're really looking at the past or at the future, and never where you actually are. That's where a lot of our anxiety comes from (so says Eckhart). If you let go of both of those things and you look at right now for what it is, which is an entirely different experience than anything you have been through before or will ever be through again, because this moment in time and this version of you has not existed and will not exist again, then you can be truly present. He also explains that if you can learn to look at that voice in your head that dogs you, that talks all that shit, that stresses you out and takes up way too much real estate in a space it does not own - if you can learn to look at that as it's own being, you can learn to tune it out.
That shitty little voice lies to you all the time. Well, actually, if you're mentally very healthy, maybe it doesn't. I don't know. I've never had my shit together like that before. My voice is mean. It's a mean little thing and I've struggled for as long as I can remember to get it to shut up. It tells me things I could do better. It harps on what I've done wrong, who I've disappointed, and how weird I can be. It criticizes me in most facets of my life. It really is a huge pain in my ass. Now that we have RB, it's added mom-guilt to its arsenal.
What is 'mom-guilt'? To me, it's all the guilt I feel for all the things I feel I could be doing better for my kid. It's when I look forward to him being older and not totally enjoying newborn life (shit is hard, but everyone tells you "soak it up!"). It's when I'm so tired that I literally pray to whatever God of Sleep there is to let him take a two-hour nap so I can doze off too. It's when all those stupid, crunchy mom TikToks show up on my feed and I feel like a failure because I don't sit on the floor with my kid all day long and show him black-and-white crinkle books. It's that feeling I get when I get caught up in something at work and realize I'm late to pick him up from daycare (our pick-up time is entirely arbitrary, but that does not matter to my stupid brain). It's the guilt I felt for him having to go to daycare because I am not made to be a stay-at-home mom. It's rampant, to put it politely.
Back to my good friend Eckhart. Through his book, I did learn how to recognize that voice as its own entity. There's my voice, which is pretty empathetic, kinda funny, and just trying her best. That's the real Grace in there. Then there's my ego, the little shit. It's rude and spiteful and can be pretty damn mean. Once I learned to detangle it from my real sense of self, it makes it easier for me to take a step back and realize maybe I'm not actually all that bad, and maybe a lot of my stress is just made up. I mean, I have very real stress, don't get me wrong. I have a lot of responsibilities and have had some very heavy losses, and that all weighs on me. It's kind of like I have this weight that sits on my chest all the time I have learned to live with it and it's pretty much a part of me. It's not abnormal and it's not something that prevents me from enjoying my life. My ego likes to push on it and make it seem heavier than it is. You know that line from Bruce Almighty? "God is a mean kid with a magnifying glass." Well, my ego is a mean kid with a magnifying glass.
Some days, I'm better at separating myself from my ego than others. Some days, it's an hour by hour thing. There are many moments that I let the stress get the better of me. I want to get the negativity out of my head. I wish I could figure out how to live without it, but I'm sure that's not possible. It does drive me to be better. It pushes me to a new level. It motivates me to get shit done. I can use that power for good, sometimes. But other times, I don't grapple with it as well. Some days, I just want relief from my stress. I don't want to fight it. I want it to just let me be.
You know who's really, really incredible at not being stressed? Happy, the big, silver, happy dog. I wish I could hear what his internal monolog is. Seriously, I would pay a pretty good amount of money for one of those collars from Up.
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